Mark Scandrette

Derek sat across the table, and, with an astonishing lack of affect, commented, “I don’t know if I believe any of this stuff about God anymore. I’m so tired of the way Christians can be. I don’t even feel anything for the people I meet when I volunteer at the soup kitchen—I know I should be sympathetic, but more often I feel resentful. I’m utterly bored with church. . . and I can’t pray. ”

Derek remembers college as the high point of his spiritual life—questioning his childhood beliefs and discovering new paths for faith surrounded by good friends. “But I’m not feeling it anymore,” he confided, with a tinge of regret.

Derek is one of many people who in recent months have told me that they no longer believe as they once did, and that they now find it difficult (or impossible) to pray. The reasons are varied. One friend was deeply hurt by a spiritual leader. Another was shunned by her Bible-belt relatives when she began to question their once commonly held assumptions. Spiritual ambivalence is often related to painful life experiences: a baby dies; memories of early sexual trauma surface; or people grapple with a major disappointment, sickness, or depression. Sometimes in the struggle to witness love’s triumph over greed, we begin to lose hope. Or we find it easier to pray with our hands than in the heart. Whatever the reason, when you lose that sense of divine connection you can feel as if you no longer “fit in” with the devoted and “true” believers.

Listening to Derek took me back to a moment of crisis in my own faith journey. My wife and I had moved with our three young children to an inner-city neighborhood and spent a year renovating a crack house and learning to love our neighbors. It was our dream to start a beautiful intentional community. But nothing worked out like we expected. Our neighbors were slow to accept us. Living in community was full of drama. People we knew thought we were crazy. The year revealed wounds we didn’t even know we had. It was hard to trust that our dreams were good and that we hadn’t been misguided. I was brought to my limit mentally and physically.

At this point, I attended a conference in New Mexico and stayed an extra day, determined to reconnect with God. I rented a car and drove north among the pueblo villages on the winding road toward Taos. I drove all day, a heavy lump in my throat, waiting to hear God’s voice, or feel some sense of warmth, comfort or release. At the end of the day, I despondently checked into a run-down motel on the outskirts of Albuquerque and spent the evening flipping channels on the T.V. I felt nothing but my own loneliness.

The path is crooked and confusing. We often wander, take missteps, and wonder if we are utterly lost. Almost everyone goes through seasons of doubt or difficulty, and at these moments, it is almost impossible to pray.

When we feel confused, perplexed, or abandoned, we are in good company. Jesus went through a time when his whole family thought he was crazy. During his execution he cried out desperately, “God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). A recently published collection of Mother Teresa’s correspondence revealed a dark night of the soul that lasted forty years. To one friend she confided, “Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness are so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”

What can we do when we feel alone or undone? Since that dark night in the motel room I’ve been learning to embrace the varied landscape that comes with being on pilgrimage.

We can risk complaining. Many of the ancient poems preserved in Scripture are laments and complaints directed towards the Creator. In one psalm, David pleads, “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (Psalm 13:1). In another he exclaims, “the darkness is my closest friend.” (Psalm 88:18) Elsewhere he expresses deepest despair with the phrase, “Look away from me, that I may rejoice again before I depart and am no more.” (Psalm 39:13) Our subjective experiences can overwhelm us with sadness. Expressing these feelings can be the beginning of hope and change. The poets and prophets show us the path. Make art from your pain. Turn it into a song or a poem. Throw some paint. The very name God chose for God’s people is Israel, literally those who “wrestle with God.” When we exercise the tenacity to fight with God for a blessing, we join a faithful and feisty cloud of witnesses who have gone before us.

We can embrace surprise. Most of those whose journeys are recorded in Scripture were thrown curve balls in their understanding of God and God’s story. Jesus was not the Messiah that anyone expected, and many of his most ardent disciples didn’t grasp the deeper meaning of what he taught until much later. I’m sure they often felt like they were losing their faith.

Having your misconceptions and earlier ideas dashed or challenged is an important, if painful, part of maturing in your walk with the Creator. When we are experiencing this benevolent deconstruction, the danger is to blame parents, elders, or a particular religious tradition for our cognitive dissonance. U-turns and surprises remind us that we are being called into the greater mystery of the kingdom of love and to a ruthless trust in what is beyond our knowing.

We can celebrate the varieties of religious experience. Sometimes I find that I am jaded about a particular tradition, perspective, or practice that no longer personally speaks to me. I see myself and others being critical, negative, or reactionary about certain religious groups or traditions.

Defining ourselves by what we are against rather than what we are for is a seductive and often destructive practice. During the course of our lives, we experience many different “ah-has” and awakenings. Perhaps you have already had many “conversions”— to brokenness; grace; God’s mercy and justice; the power of the Spirit; the immediacy of God’s presence; the call to be a healer; the community of the saints; or the messiness of the journey. On the precipice of another conversion, it can feel like you are replacing one way with another. But at our best we see these shifts as part of the gradual awakening to reality and the rounding out of our spiritual path.

We can cultivate the generosity to celebrate another person’s “ah-has” even when they are different than our own. Catholic writer Paul Elie suggests that both Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day chose to be a part of the Catholic church even though some aspects of it offended their intellectual and urbane sensibilities because it was the place where the poor and huddled masses of new immigrants in their time gathered. We are invited to celebrate where the Spirit is at work in the world, especially among the poor and two-thirds world peoples.

We can get creative and experiment with new practices. Jessica confessed to a friend in our community, “I don’t really get anything out of reading the Bible or praying anymore.” The advice she got surprised her: “Well, maybe you should stop reading the Bible for at least a year!”

Each of us has a set of practices to connect with God which we were taught or adopted. These may be helpful for a while, but may become worn and threadbare. As we change, we need to discover new God-conscious practices that connect our longings with this stage of the journey. Christian practices across time and cultures are varied and rich. If you have grown tired of petitionary prayer, try journaling, drawing, or sitting still in the presence of God. If all you know is contemplative practice, try joining a raucous group of singing worshippers or healing intercessors. If you have only experienced God’s presence in gathered church meetings, seek God in the solitude and beauty of nature. If you tend to get stuck in your head considering theological questions or ideas, look for God by spending time with someone who lives on the margins. A spiritual practice is anything you do to seek intentional awareness and to surrender to your Maker. Get creative and experimental. When you get hungry for the staples that sustained you in the past, you can return to them as needed.

Life with God feels a lot like the practice of family life. My children are now teenagers, and as an intentional discipline, we eat together almost every night. There are a lot of evening meals when we are distracted or tired and the most exciting thing that happens is the small argument about whose turn it is to do the dishes. But every once in a while, something magical happens. We laugh or cry, have that important conversation, or feel like we really belong to one another. Those rare and cherished moments of family memory are made possible by the practice of showing up to the ordinary.

I’m not suggesting that we can address our struggles to believe or pray with simple answers or trite methodologies. But we can show up. We can be realistic about how complicated a life of faith can be. And we can still expect a bit of magic. Some people call this a second naiveté. It is something that I yearn for—for myself and for every person I know who lives in the questions.